LTE in Japan by December

LTE in Japan by December

Posted by Sam Churchill on November 8th, 2010

NTT Docomo plans to launch commercial LTE service in Japan on December 24th. The Japanese mobile operator was the world’s first to launch a 3G network, back in 2001. TeliaSonera in Sweden, was the world’s first to launch LTE, in December last year.

Docomo will join TeliaSonera,MetroPCS and soon Verizon Wireless as the first commercial LTE operators.

At launch Docomo’s LTE service will cover Tokyo, parts of Osaka, Nagoya and a handful of other areas near these cities. It is initially limited to only major cities. The $80 USD monthly fee covers up to 5 gigabytes of data transmission.

DoCoMo says it is testing the LTE network for speed, latency, and inter-cell handover stability. The operator wants to confirm data rates of 37.5 Mbit/s on the downlink and 12.5 Mbit/s on the uplink on 5MHz frequency channels, and later maximum data rates of 75 Mbit/s on the downlink and 25 Mbit/s on the uplink in 10-MHz channels, says Light Reading.

NTT DOCOMO serves over 56 million customers in Japan, including 49 million using i-mode, the world’s most popular mobile e-mail/Internet platform, and 54 million usingFOMA, the world’s original 3G mobile service based on W-CDMA.

China Mobile, the largest mobile operator in the world with over 570 million customers, is reportedly planning metro TD-LTE trials in up to six cities; Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Xiamen. Various reports suggest the world’s largest operator has deployed 3,000 base stations and is waiting for approval by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). China Mobile has had a TD-LTE trial network (supplied by a number of major vendors) in place for the last six months at the Shanghai Expo, although the event closed last week.

source: dailywireless.org